Safely joining up information to protect children
This is a joint post with Harry Trimble at Projects by IF.
Access to the right information, at the right time, matters. It matters in business, and matters even more when protecting vulnerable children. When care professionals don’t have the right information at the right time, it has an impact on vulnerable children. This is tragically illustrated by the Baby P case, where information was not available to those who needed it.
But considerations of the risks and ethics of sharing data must go alongside attempts to improve data access for the relevant people. That, too, is part of protecting vulnerable people in society. Privacy shouldn’t just be a privilege for the wealthy few, or for adults; it’s important for everyone.
There have been attempts to join up information about children, with limited success. To take one example, ContactPoint, a central government database that held information on all children under 18 in England, was shut down in 2010 for concerns over privacy and security. It cost millions of pounds to build, operate and then close.
That’s why we’ve started working with IF to explore how to safely join up information about children. In a two week design sprint, a team of technologists, researchers and designers from IF worked with our child protection experts and frontline workers to understand the ethical considerations around data sharing and creating authoritative national data sources in children’s care.
The crucial need for access
Bits of information about a vulnerable child could be in lots of different places: school reports, NHS records, police databases, a profile with a mental health charity, social workers case notes, etc. Care professionals need to be able to quickly understand a child’s full situation and the trade-offs between intervening in their life or not.
At the moment, the burden is on children to communicate information. During research, we learned that a child has to tell their story 17 times. We have a duty to make this easier for them.
Accessing relevant information is a slow and manual process, which affects the care that professionals are able to give. We also heard in research that: “All agencies have different systems. That’s why things go wrong, things get missed.” Chronic underfunding and insufficient resources is hugely demoralising — it’s one of the reasons mentioned by social workers in a recent survey, which found almost two-thirds (61%) of wanted to leave their current job in the next 6 months.
Organisations working together
No one organisation has all the relevant information about a child’s situation. There have been efforts to join up information across organisations: the recent Child Protection Information Sharing project aims to link software systems across health and social care. This would mean a social worker could see if a child in their care attends an A&E anywhere in the country.
Starting to join together existing systems is a positive start. But a bolder approach could transform the way services operate in the future.
Challenges to building a better future
We need a future where data empowers and connects people to make informed, faster decisions for children. A future where care professionals can spend less time wrestling with multiple systems and more time supporting the children, young people and families that need them.
The law already allows information access between organisations and there are successful examples of this in other areas like finance and transportation. In the case of children’s services, there’s a need for greater understanding and confidence about what data can be shared, more willingness to collaborate across organisations and, crucially, more funding.
Building better future child services presents challenges that are cultural, financial and technical. And with faster access to information comes new risks and considerations. In a future post, we’ll share more details about the work we’ve done to imagine how to overcome some of these challenges, and transform child social care services for the better.
Meera is a Product Manager in the Barnardo’s Data Transformation team and Harry is a Designer at IF. We’d like to thank to Ella Fitzsimmons, María Izquierdo, and Grace Annan-Callcott at IF; and Mark Hoult-Allen and Jason Caplin at Barnardo’s for their contributions to this post. We’d also like to thank everyone who contributed to the research.
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